The Scarlet Letter eBook

over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams
and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and despair
of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond
the grave. But it was the constant shadow of
my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom
he had most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist
only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge!
Yea, indeed, he did not err, there was a fiend at
his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart,
has become a fiend for his especial torment.”

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words,
lifted his hands with a look of horror, as if he had
beheld some frightful shape, which he could not recognise,
usurping the place of his own image in a glass.
It was one of those moments—­which sometimes
occur only at the interval of years—­when
a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to
his mind’s eye. Not improbably he had
never before viewed himself as he did now.

“Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said
Hester, noticing the old man’s look. “Has
he not paid thee all?”

“No, no! He has but increased the debt!”
answered the physician, and as he proceeded, his manner
lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided into
gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester,
as I was nine years agone? Even then I was in
the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn.
But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious,
thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the
increase of mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too,
though this latter object was but casual to the other—­faithfully
for the advancement of human welfare. No life
had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few
lives so rich with benefits conferred. Dost
thou remember me? Was I not, though you might
deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others,
craving little for himself—­kind, true, just
and of constant, if not warm affections? Was
I not all this?”

“All this, and more,” said Hester.

“And what am I now?” demanded he, looking
into her face, and permitting the whole evil within
him to be written on his features. “I
have already told thee what I am—­a fiend!
Who made me so?”

“It was myself,” cried Hester, shuddering.
“It was I, not less than he. Why hast
thou not avenged thyself on me?”

“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,”
replied Roger Chillingworth. “If that
has not avenged me, I can do no more!”

He laid his finger on it with a smile.

“It has avenged thee,” answered Hester
Prynne.

“I judged no less,” said the physician.
“And now what wouldst thou with me touching
this man?”